Which famous person's ancestral path to America included Mexican and Jewish ancestry?
A. Actress/singer Lea Michele’s father, Mark Sarfati, is a Sephardic Jew whose family originally came from Spain, later immigrating to Turkey, and finally to Mexico, where Mark married Lea’s mother, Edith, a Roman Catholic. They moved to the Bronx, where Lea was born in 1986. Though primarily raised Catholic, Michele told Us Magazine, “I’ve always been proud of my body, my Jewish nose and all of that.”
B. Journalist/talk show host Geraldo Rivera is the son of Lillian Friedman, whose ancestry is Ashkenazic Russian, and Cruz Rivera, a Catholic from Mexico. They met while both were working at a restaurant in New York, and moved to Long Island after marrying. Geraldo was raised Jewish and had a bar mitzvah, which took place at the North Lindenhurst Fire Department Hall because there was no nearby synagogue.
C. Magician David Blaine was born in Brooklyn, the son of Patrice White and William Perez. Perez was half Mexican and half Italian, while White was of Russian Jewish descent. They met when White was working with the Peace Corps in the small village in Mexico where Perez lived. Blaine sports several tattoos, including the numbers that were branded on Primo Levi’s arm at Auschwitz.
D. Comedian/actor Louis C.K.’s grandfather, Geza Székely Schweiger, was a Hungarian Jewish surgeon who immigrated to Mexico, where he married a Catholic Mexican woman and raised his son Luis as Catholic. Luis married an Irish Catholic woman, Mary, and they raised their son Louis as Catholic. Luis later divorced Mary and married a Jewish woman, and then he converted to Orthodox Judaism. Louis is now an agnostic.
E. George W. Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, famous for the memo that argued that waterboarding was not torture, was the grandson of Mel Blanc and Friz Frelang, both Jews who came from Vornerbradders in Poland. After they immigrated to Mexico, their daughter Ilana, known as “Looney,” married Arriba “Speedy” Gonzales, a Mexican Olympic runner, and their son Alberto was born in 1955.